Recently I was asked to pull together a simple “one-pager” on lead gen for a game industry start-up. While lead gen has been always been a big part of offline marketing (outbound marketing for sure), today any study of lead generation primarily focuses on online tactics (called inbound) lead generation. See HubSpot’s excellent ebook on the subject for instance and you’ll know what I mean. This said, I took took it upon myself to think about what successful lead generation might look like both online and offline for companies providing tech solutions in the game dev space.

It’s no surprise that HTML5 has not yet delivered on all its promises. WebGL has some major dependencies on HTML5 issues being resolved before we’ll see many awesome games, efficient 3D content creation apps, or secure 3D enterprise apps. For simplicity, I’ve dumped the issues into two buckets, technical and non-technical. …

Beyond games,WebGL has broad applicability in the education, scientific and simulation space as well. In my opinion, the best compendium for WebGL experiments can be found on the Google Chrome site, with my favorite being the 3D aquarium: this one rivals similar ones I’ve seen built in the Unity engine. But I’d be amiss if I didn’t mention how gorgeous Alexsandar Rodic’s jelly fish experiment is which I first encountered back in spring or summer of 2010 at a WebGL MeetUp in SF. There are likely many strong use cases for WebGL outside of gaming.

Where is WebGL popping up today for end user applications? Since I’m mostly interested in games, let’s start with games. Here’s what I’ve found so far: Applications for WebGL are popping up like snowdrop flowers in the winter, but still there are not so many that it’s hard to classify them. Beyond the few WebGL games and other applications for immersive interactive 3D experiences, I am also starting to see some of the necessary support and infrastructure for WebGL developers.